An asymmetry between good and evil, and an argument against utilitarianism

Here is an asymmetry between good and evil actions. It is very easy to generate cases of infinitely morally bad actions. You just need to imagine an agent who has the belief that if she raises her right hand, she will cause torment to an infinite number of people. And she raises her right hand in order to do so. But there doesn't seem to be a corresponding easy way to generate infinitely morally good actions. Take the case of an agent who thinks that if she raises her right hand, she will save infinitely many people from misery. Her raising her right hand will be a good action, but it will not be an infinitely morally good action. In fact, it will not be morally better than raising her right hand in a case where she believes that doing so will relieve finitely many from misery.

To make the point clearer, observe that it is a morally great thing to sacrifice one's life to save ten people. But it is a morally more impressive thing to sacrifice one's life to save one person. Compare St Paul's sentiment in Romans 5:7, that it is more impressive to die for an unrighteous than a righteous person.

Chris Tweedt, when I mentioned some of these ideas, noted that they provide an argument against utilitarianism: utilitarianism cannot explain why it would be better to save one life than to save ten lives.

Now of course if the choice is between saving one life and saving ten lives with the sacrifice, then saving ten lives is normally the better action. In fact, if the one life is that of a person among the ten, to save only that one life would normally[note 1] be irrational, and we morally ought not be irrational. But that's because choices should be considered contrastively. Previously, when I said that giving one's life for one is better than giving one's life for ten, I meant that

1. choosing to save one other's life over saving one's own life

was a better choice than

2. choosing to save ten others' lives over saving one's own life.

But the present judgment was, instead, that:

3. choosing to save one other's life over saving one's own life or saving ten others' lives

is normally rationally and morally inferior to

4. choosing to save ten others' lives over saving one's own life or saving one other's life.

Cases (1) and (2) were comparisons between choices made in different choice situations, while cases (3) and (4) were comparisons between choices made in the same choice situation. The moral value of a choice depends not just on what one is choosing but on what one is choosing over (this is obvious).

But even after taking this into account, it's hard to see how a utilitarian can make sense of the judgment that (1) is morally superior to (2). In fact, from the utilitarian's point of view, if everything relevant is equal, (1) is morally neutral—it makes no net difference—while (2) is morally positive.

Perhaps, though, we need a distinction between moral impressiveness and moral goodness? So maybe (1) is more morally impressive than (2), but (2) is still morally better. This distinction would be analogous to that between moral repugnance and moral badness. Pulling wings off flies for fun is perhaps more morally repugnant than killing someone in a fair fight to defend one's reputation, but the latter is a morally worse act.

But I do not think the difference between (1) and (2) is just that of moral impressiveness. Here's one way to see this. It is plausible that as one increases the number of people whose lives are saved, or starts to include among them people one has special duties of care towards, one will reach the point where the sacrifice of one's life is morally obligatory. But to sacrifice one's life to save one stranger is morally supererogatory. And while I don't want to say that every supererogatory action is better than every obligatory action, this seems to be a case where the supererogatory action is better than the obligatory one.

On reflection, however, it is quite possible to increase the moral value of a good act. Just imagine, for instance, that you believe that you will suffer forever unless you murder an innocent person. Then refraining from the immoral action will be infinitely good (or just infinitely impressive?). So we can increase the badness of an action apparently without bound by making the intended result worse, and we can increase the goodness of an action by making the expected cost to self worse (as long as one does not by doing so render the action irrational--cases need to be chosen carefully).

Is it good to be the sort of person who is never willing to lie?

There are cases where it seems that great harm comes from a refusal to lie. Thus there appears to be a strong consequentialist case against an absolutist position against lying. But I think that if we shift from act-consequentialism to what one might call character-consequentialism, there may be a case for an absolutist position. At least it has not been shown otherwise.

Act-consequentialism says that of all the acts available to one, one should perform the kind of act that will maximize good consequences. Character-consequentialism says that out of all the characters that one might develop, one should have that moral character having which will maximize expected good consequences. (This is a variant on rule-utilitarianism, of course.) There are differences in recommendation between the two consequentialisms. For instance, suppose there is no afterlife. Then there will be cases where act-consequentialism will recommend condemning the innocent to death in order to prevent riots seeking the innocent's death. But character-consequentialism may require one to have a character that never gives in to injustice. For having such a character will make it less likely that people will riot to blackmail one into condemning the innocent to death, plus it will make one more strongly committed to the cause of justice.

What about lying? Bracketing the afterlife, there will be circumstances where the absolutist anti-lying character will produce poorer consequences than the more pragmatic character who generally tells the truth but lies sometimes. But there will also be circumstances where the absolutist will produce better consequences than the pragmatist. These will be circumstances where the good consequences depend on one's sincere testimony being believed. If Professor Kowalska is known to be an absolutist and a student is about to jump off a tall building, and Professor Kowalska yells to the student "Don't jump—I thought your last paper was good", that carries weight. If Kowalska were known to have the more pragmatic character, the student could say: "You're just saying that to make me not jump."

Of course, there is also the case where the student's last paper was no good, and in that case the pragmatist's lie at least has some chance of averting suiciding. But the pragmatist's lie is less likely to work than truth from the absolutist would be.

The question whether the consequences of being an absolutist or being a pragmatist then depend on the relative frequencies, as weighted by what is at stake, of the following two kinds of situations:

1. Cases where (a) one believes p and (b) good consequences follow from one's interlocutor's accepting p.
2. Cases where (a) one disbelieves p and (b) good consequences follow from one's interlocutor's accepting p.

Now, I think that cases of type (1) are more common, because I am inclined to think that (i) there is a positive correlation between what one believes and what is true (this is an anti-sceptical principle of credulity) and (ii) there is a positive correlation between what is true and what is beneficial (not just to the believer) to believe, so there is, probably, a positive correlation between what one believes and what it would be beneficial if one's interlocutor believed.

Granted, there are spectacular paradigm cases of (2), such as when the Gestapo comes to one's door and asks if one is hiding some Jews (and let us suppose no clever solution like I try in this paper works). But these cases are fortunately rare (and even in those cases, there is the practical consideration how likely one's lie is to convince the interlocutor—if we were doing principled ethics, we could ignore this consideration, but we're doing character-consequentialism and can't ignore it). And corresponding to these cases there will be cases where the Gestapo comes to one's door and asks if one is hiding Jews, and one is not hiding Jews but nonetheless the consequences of the Gestapo searching the house would be grave (maybe one is hiding a Gypsy or a Slav, or one has forbidden books). In those cases there may be a serious benefit from having a reputation for absolutism in regard to lying.

In any case, we don't live in Nazi society. And there probably are many cases in our courts where the prevention of grave injustice requires that some sincere witness be believed.

Moreover, there are many small everyday type (1) cases where we can expect the absolutist to produce better results because, say, her praise is more likely to be believed.

It is ultimately a serious empirical question whether the absolutist or pragmatist character in regard to lying can be expected to be the more beneficial one. But the point I want to make is that has not been shown that the absolutist character does worse on average.